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Kindling Interest In The iPad Or: Will The iPad Make Kindling Of Amazon?
Last Updated on Tuesday, 27 July 2010 Written by Dan Barnett Monday, 19 April 2010
Dan Barnett
I'm writing this piece in the Pages app for Apple's iPad using the keyboard dock for the device. Propped up on my lap, the arrangement is workable but, as my wife points out, it seems counterintuitive to indulge in the "iPad scrunch" while a perfectly good laptop with a larger screen is waiting on a nearby table.
"Ah, but this is an experiment," I tell her. "I'm trying to see how much of my work I can accomplish using the iPad." Quite a bit, it turns out. Using the iPad's native Safari browser, I can handily log in to my school's Learning Management System and read student postings on a delightfully clear screen--but only indoors, with the right lighting. Don't get me started on the glare issue. For short replies, I can hunt-and-peck on the virtual keyboard; for longer ruminations a Bluetooth keyboard or keyboard dock is a necessity.
Much has been made about the iPad being a so-called "Kindle killer" that will mean the quick demise of Amazon's dedicated e-reader. In fact, because the iPad and the Kindle serve different purposes in my own digital life, I've become an enthusiastic user of both.
The Kindle and the iPad side-by-side.
The six-inch Kindle, priced at $259, with its e-Ink display that resembles a printed gray page, shines in full sunlight. Or, rather, it doesn't shine since, unlike the iPad, the screen is not back lit. The brighter the light, the crisper the text. The iPad, at $499 for the base model, is a fingerprint magnet and, at 1.5 pounds vs. the Kindle's 11 ounces, is like holding a big hardbound book. The Kindle is the little paperback it's fun to snuggle up with.
The Kindle is primarily for long-form, immersive reading, like accreditation standards, and at that it excels. Though font sizes can be changed, the actual fonts are pretty generic. There's not much page design here, just text on a small screen. A click of the page forward button, a brief flash, and the next page pops into view. I've read quite a few full-length books on my Kindle, and the experience is immersive. (The device also displays PDF's, but awkwardly.) Diagrams and tables don't show up well, and there's no color, but for text reading the Kindle can be held for hours without strain.
The Apple iBooks app provides gorgeous page displays on the iPad, much like reading a well-designed p-book (remember paper?). Images are colorful and the page flip animation, with text shown in shadow on the underside of the page, is still cool after two weeks of living with the device.
Barnett with his Kindle and iPad.
Reading on the iPad is immersive, too, if one can forget the weight. The optional Apple cover can be reconfigured into a stand for the device so one can eat Cheerios and read at the same time. A swipe of the finger turns the page.
With the Kindle, there are no distractions. The iPad will morph more quickly, and more radically. It will still provide a hardbound reading experience second-to-none, but the distractions are manifold. Primarily for content consumption, not content creation, though that will change, too, the iPad allows me to do most of my routine work with relative ease. But so can my laptop. The difference is that while one "lugs around" a laptop, one "carries" an iPad.
Will the iPad make kindling of the Kindle? On the contrary, the Kindle iPad app, with access to half a million Amazon e-books, is a good reason to buy an iPad. One day textbooks will begin showing up on the iPad in all their multimedia glory and the real educational revolution will have begun. For now, I'll continue to enjoy my Kindle as well as the iPad; though the tablet has more potential in the educational technology realm, the Kindle started something big in bringing e-books into the light of day. And the story for both devices is far from over.
Now, if I can just extricate myself from my iPad scrunch, I have to turn off the laptop.
Dan Barnett teaches philosophy online at Butte College
and is the school's faculty coordinator for Technology Mediated Instruction.
Comments
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iPad and LMS
— 2010-04-20 11:39Butte College TMI Coordinator
— 2010-04-20 12:12Our school is using Blackboard CE 8 (the old WebCT) but not MobileLearn. The Safari browser in the iPad works just fine; I'm able to read student posts, add comments, enter grades, and so on, and haven't found anything in my online class routines that I'm unable to do.
Compiled posts show up beautifully on the screen and the display makes reading easy in the easy chair. I use the free iPad Evernote app to hold grades and text excerpts that I use in my summary emails to students.
For long-form typing, the keyboard dock or Bluetooth keyboard is a necessity, and then one might as well work a bit more
Using the iPad is fairly efficient and, for routine interaction with our LMS, I'm entirely satisfied.
iPad smudging
— 2010-04-20 11:51Smudging?
— 2010-04-20 12:19I've read that the oleophobic coating is indeed used on the iPad, and fingerprints can easily be rubbed off. I lose awareness of smudginess as I'm reading using the Kindle app, for example, except for some very light shadows that seem to be part of the white pages.
But when the device is turned off--what we have is a feast for the gang at CSI!
Faculty
— 2010-04-27 09:40Publishing on the iPad?
— 2010-04-27 10:51I've tried Pages, but it's not yet a full-fledged word processor. Some have complained that for any but simple pages the output formatting can be iffy.
Since iBooks uses the ePub format, it would seem Pages would have to improve significantly and add this an an output, or perhaps Apple would develop another standalone app for publishing purposes. Right now no one beats Amazon's simple DTP (digital text platform) process.
I'm curious about your Smashwords experience. Once the ePub file is created, don't you have to put it into iTunes and then sync it with the iPad through USB?
El Jobso has famously said that "no one reads anymore" and the iBookstore might be evidence of Apple's underwhelming interest in ebooks. Unless you know the title or author, you can't browse books beyond the top 50. Who ever heard of a bookstore that can't be browsed? (It's the same with the App Store.)
Cheerily,
Dan
RE: Faculty
— 2010-05-09 15:17Donna, I gave a presentation using the iPad and Keynote and an LCD projector.
The Keynote software for iPad is more like Keynote lite...some of the things that you can do with the desktop version do not transfer over to the mobile version like:links to the web. Safari does NOT display with VGA, so I had to take screen shots of the web pages I wanted to talk about.
I'm hoping that this will be fixed in future versions.
Instructor
— 2010-05-09 15:53It would be cool if you could make your keynote preso on your mac, put it in iTunes and then just sync it to your iPad!
Was your preso about the iPad? Just curious! I'm looking for some ideas!
Guess it is time to up my "allowance" on the iTunes store!
Donna
RE: Instructor
— 2010-05-10 12:07Was your preso about the iPad? Just curious! I'm looking for some ideas!
Sorry, no iPad preso...I was presenting at CATESOL (California Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) It was a presentation on using the My Hero website for students with little to no tech and language skills.
But I was a hit with tech support!
Re: Publishing on the iPad?
— 2010-05-10 12:27iTunes supports PDF files, so perhaps one could:
- create a presentation in Keynote on a desktop Mac
- save the pres. as a PDF
- add the PDF to iTunes
- sync iTunes iPad
Would that do it?